Hacktivist movement Anonymous has hijacked the US Sentencing Commission website as a personal vendetta to retaliate against the justice system that threatened to imprison web activist Aaron Swartz, who recently committed suicide, for decades.

The website was hacked early Saturday and a message was placed
saying that “a line was crossed” when Swartz killed
himself two weeks ago.

“Two weeks ago today, Aaron Swartz was killed. Killed because
he faced an impossible choice. Killed because he was forced into
playing a game he could not win — a twisted and distorted
perversion of justice — a game where the only winning move was
not to play,” the statement read.

Screenshot from www.ussc.gov

Anonymous now threatens to release secret information that they
have reportedly copied from several governments’ computer systems
they were able to access.

The hackers also put up their video statement and a list of files
named after US Supreme Court justices on the hacked website.

Earlier, Anonymous gained access to MIT’s website and the
Department of Justice, DOJ.gov website, using distributed
denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to avenge the passing of Swartz.

Aaron Swartz, who co-founded both the website Reddit and the
activism organization Demand Progress, was due to appear in
federal court during the coming weeks because the United States
says he illegally downloaded millions of academic papers from the
website JSTOR, presumably for public distribution, while logged
onto the computer network of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. If convicted, Swartz could have been sentenced to
upwards of 35 years in prison and a US$1 million fine.

The 26-year-old Harvard fellow openly discussed his bouts with
depression in the past, but Swartz’s parents and advocates alike
have suggested that a serious legal fight that has dominated the
activist’s life in recent years played a role in his passing.

In a statement published shortly after his death, the activist’s
family said, “Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy.
It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with
intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by
officials in the Massachusetts US Attorney’s office and at MIT
contributed to his death.”

Others, including Kim Dotcom, the founder of the now-defunct
file-storage site Megaupload, also believe that Aaron Swartz
became a political target, and that is what led to his tragic
death.

"There is no reasonable cause behind going after a young
genius like him in the fashion they did," Dotcom told
RT in an interview.